If a girl is raped and pregnant, should she keep the baby?

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Wow.
I can't believe this conversation is still going, and it's also still right where it was about 60 pages ago.

Which part of 'the wiring needed for consciousness does not exist until around 20 weeks' do you not understand?

So you have your own arbitrary definition. Funnily enough, the world does not revolve around you. You are not an authority here.

First of all, I'll say outright I'm NOT an authority on this kind of thing. If it is a human being, it seems to me wrong to knowingly destroy it, regardless of stage of development. If it is attached to the placenta, it is sustaining itself. Whether the placenta of a living mother is required is irrelevant. That's where I think the whole "viability" argument is insufficient.

But as far as what you mentioned here goes and what you're having trouble convincing Inuyasha (and myself, honestly) is that it is not a person. The fact is that life begins BEFORE conception because sperm and eggs really are living cells. We just don't consider an individual sperm cell or an individual egg by itself to be a person.

The plain fact is we don't know, and we cannot know, whether a fertilized, implanted egg is itself a conscious being that just happens to be momentarily dependent on the mother in order to sustain itself. Certainly that "lump of cells" knows enough about what it's doing to get where it needs to grow.

What seems wrong to me about the "necessary wiring" is that the necessary wiring develops from pre-existing cells. And that does start at conception.

You don't know with certainty at which point it's a person, and I just think it better to play it safe. No need to destroy a living person if there is no need.

And why is that? Why am I not sinning when I masturbate, get wet dreams or just piss old sperms out of my system? Better yet, why isn't nature sinning, for making me that way? And why isn't nature sinning or murdering when it spontaneously aborts fetuses/"babies"? Why isn't nature sinning or murdering when an actual born, healthy baby dies, AFTER it has been born? I'm talking about sudden infant death (if it's called that in English). Why is it okay that nature does it, but not humans? Or should nature maybe be punished for it, as well? If it should not be, why not?

By the way, if a girl gets pregnant, like in Mississippi, in the future, if that evil passes, but she does under no circumstances want to give birth to the baby, and wants to take her life to get out of the situation - do you prefer that, then? Do you think she should take her life? If not, why not? People like YOU made her do it. People like you. YOU would be responsible for her death. What you believe in is pure evil with no empathy.

By the way, a thing without a personality cannot be a person.

The thing with Ad Nauseum is that no matter how many times you'll repeat something, we will repeat the same reply. Electrical nerve impulses != brain activity.

It is severely unlikely there is any relevant brain activity until the 26-th week. Seeing how the brain is not even plugged to sensory organs until then.

We DO know when consciousness is possible. You are simply choosing not to engage with that fact. Consult the available science for yourself. Use google, for flip's sake.

Early nerve cells are not the same as consciousness. Hello?

Actually, I'm going to be perfectly blunt and point out that your side and my side really have no clue when consciousness is possible, however if you actually think things through, evidence supports the pro-life side a lot better than the pro-abortion side. In case you all didn't realize this, the brain is capable of rewiring itself and using other parts of the brain to support functions that a part of the brain that is supposed to do it is not. In fact everyone here that is on the spectrum is a living example of this because the part of our brain that is supposed to perceive biological motion, facial expressions, etc. is not the part of the brain that we use to process that information.

It is entirely possible (and also very plausible) that consciousness is in a seperate part of the brain and then transferred to the cerebrum (I think that's what you said was where consciousness was) when that part of the brain is finished. Our brain is like an organic computer in many respects, and it is entirely possible that our brains are capable of moving data (our consciousness) from the part of the brain where it is originally housed to the cerebrum. Remember the amount of information the brain actually needs to process while inside the womb is quite small compared to all the stimuli the child will be exposed to when first outside the womb.

read up on biology,
consciousness is not a physical thing, it is the effect of a whole interconnected brain working in sync,
there are some prerequisites we can place and as so we can set a limit where it isnt possible, we cannot pinpoint an exact date.

Actually, you can't pinpoint an exact date, because we're not dealing with an equivalent level of sensory exposure. While you may claim it is such and such time, the problem with your argument is that the child in the womb is not receiving the same amount of sensory input to process and thus there is a variable thrown into your little experiment that is a known factor in the level of brain activity at any given point.

If you can come up with either evidence for that or a reason why the brain would even need to do such a thing, I am all ears. Until then, I am going with the actual evidence, not with someone's personal theory that the brain MIGHT be doing this or that. You do know that anencephalic infants never show consciousness, right? Which kind of s**ts on your theory that consciousness can go on elsewhere in the brain.

Well you are actually a living example of parts of the brain doing things that other parts of the brain were supposed to do. In the case of anencephalic infants, you do realize that there could be further brain damage, additionally it could be that we have the equivalent of a hardware crash.

Not sure if you are a Star Trek fan, but look at Star Trek III, The Search for Spock, how the main computer fried because they already had it maxed out just getting where they wanted to go, but adding in combat conditions was just too much for it to handle.

We don't know when consciousness begins precisely, but we can make bounds. I can estimate that for most people, you can be 100% certain that there is such after birth. It is also possible to find dates before birth in which you can be 100% certain that consciousness is impossible. For example, it is unlikely that consciousness begins at conception as four cells a brain do not make.

All during the thread, we have come up with a perfectly reasonable threshold. 26-ish weeks, when the brain is actually getting plugged to senses. Before the senses are plugged to the brain it is really non-sense to think of consciousness as there is no stimuli to it, and at that point it doesn't matter if the brain is magical and can reconfigure itself, because there are still no senses. So we can be pretty safe with 26 weeks. But we are so very kind, that we are only asking for abortion to be legal until the 9-th or 10-th week. That gives us at least 16 weeks of margin of error.







Hahaha.

The 26 weeks doesn't fly because there are signs of voluntary movement well before that.

I'm not going to play games guessing about when "consciousness" begins, all I care about is when life begins, and I'm going to keep my stance as being when the first brain activity is detected which is 48 days after conception.

When it comes to a child's life I'm going to stand by my convictions.

Who's asking for that? It's legal until week 18, in Sweden (until week 22 in certain cases). It should be increased.

Inuyasha and company, can you please answer the questions I asked in my previous post? Thank you.

A foetus is a human being, with functioning organs. I will accept that unqualified statement.

But until 21 weeks gestational age is has no capacity to survive independently, and the death of the mother necessarily results in foetal death.

Therefore I am fully prepared to accept the loss of that human being (whether or not it is a legal person) as an unfortunate but necessary consequence to the preservation of a woman's right to life, liberty and security of the person.

I do not believe that any degree of neurological or muscular activity is in any way determinative of the issue. I respect that others will disagree.

Can we now leave this topic?

And not enough neural mass to be a person. That takes time and brain growth.

ruveyn